Region's challenges not insurmountable for young chefs

Sunday

After years of culinary school and apprenticeships, young chefs are eager, inspired, and ready to create the next new dish that lights the world on fire.

Unfortunately, some chefs say, Utica can be a tough place to realize that potential. Tough, but not impossible.

After years of culinary school and apprenticeships, young chefs are eager, inspired, and ready to create the next new dish that lights the world on fire.

Unfortunately, some chefs say, Utica can be a tough place to realize that potential. Tough, but not impossible.

“If you’re that young chef that wants to do those new things, you’re going to have a challenge,” said Francis Pezzolanella, a Johnson and Wales culinary school graduate who has managed restaurants in Utica and Boston. He currently owns Baggs’ Square Café on Broad Street.

Instead of looking for the next new thing, Pezzolanella said, area diners want to know what a chef’s version of chicken riggies tastes like, or how his greens are, or whether she makes good tomato pie.

That’s partially because of the city’s strong Italian heritage, and partially because the city’s diners, on average, tend to be older and more set in their tastes.

The lack of young customers is just one of the hurdles young chefs face in the area, Pezzolanella said.

In other cities, he said, young people drive the food culture by constantly looking for the next big thing, the next new restaurant, the next hot young chef.

But in the Mohawk Valley, he explained, it can take months for word to spread about even the really great restaurants.

And even then, diners may know the restaurants or the food, but they usually can’t tell you about the chef, Pezzolanella said.

“The media and the public don’t put them up on a pedestal like they do in other cities,” he said.

Success stories

The Nole brothers – 36-year-old Jason and 41-year-old Dean – may be the closest thing the area has to that “celebrity chef.” And their experience shows there is hope for innovative newcomers to the restaurant scene despite the challenges.

The pair owns two local restaurants: Café CaNole on Campion Road in New Harford and Ancora! on Genesee Street in Utica, where they put interesting twists on food – with entrees such as “pork and beans” made with crispy pork legs and stewed Tuscan beans, and side dishes like truffle whipped potatoes.

Dean Nole said the catering that he and Jason did between leaving school and opening their first restaurant in 1996 was a great way to get their names out there.

And that name has only grown since.

Now the brothers are trying to capitalize on their name recognition by producing Utica greens and gluten-free almond paste cookies commercially.

“That’s where you try to grow,” Nole said. “Utica greens, it’s really different; it’s unique. We’ve been having some good success with some different distributors trying to grow on that.”

Meanwhile, there’s a crop of new young chefs – like 29-year-old Luke Barrett, of Little Falls – who are trying to follow in the Noles’ footsteps.

Barrett opened his own restaurant, The Willows, on Culver Avenue in Utica about 18 months ago. He first attended Johnson and Wales and worked at several area restaurants, including O’Connor’s Alexander Hamilton Inn for three years prior to its closure in 2007. He also helped to open Aqua Vino Restaurant that same year.

Barrett always wanted to stay in the area – “It’s home to me,” he said – but eventually settled on his current location after originally looking in Little Falls.

“This seemed to be the spot,” he said. “Utica is rich in its food culture.”

‘A little bit of a spin’

The Willows, Barrett said, is located right in the heart of Italian East Utica. And despite Pezzolanella’s assertion that diners want the food they grew up with, Barrett thinks his American fusion cuisine appeals to the customers there for exactly the opposite reason.

“They want something different that they’re not going to get at home all the time,” he said. “We try to do a little bit of a spin on it … I think people have been pretty receptive to that.”

Nole said success lies in finding a way to walk the fine line between creativity and comfort, between intriguing customers and scaring them away.

“You have to give the customer what they want,” Nole said.

In his experience, he said, “people want comfortable food. They want good-looking, clean food. We just take it to a different level.”

Both graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, the Nole brothers blended Italian, French and Spanish influences in an attempt to create their own style of cooking.

When asked what their style is now, Dean says “It’s Café CaNole.”

And Nole said they also put their own spin on the plating and the look of the food, for example by using different shaped plates.

While he said sometimes the customers are not open to all the different things chefs want to try, some area residents – especially those who have traveled outside the area – “are now demanding different food.”

Nole said food magazines and television programs are also opening the public’s eyes to what is possible with food.

“It’s appreciated more than it ever was,” Nole said.

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